Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to a method and an apparatus for controlling operation of a plurality of processor cores within an electronic device, and more particularly, to a method for controlling operating frequencies and on/off of processor cores within an electronic device, and an apparatus thereof.
Description of the Related Art
Employing multiple processors to execute different portions of one or more computer programs in parallel on different processors has become increasingly prevalent as computation complexity increases. To this end, current microprocessors normally integrate multiple processing cores in contrast to several years ago when single core microprocessors are the rule.
While the benefit of multi-core processing is well-known, efficient management of the multi-core is sometimes a very complicated job. The challenge lies in determining how many cores should be turned on to exploit the proper degree of parallelism and under what clock frequency the turned-on cores should operate at. There is always a tradeoff between number of turned-on cores and their working frequencies given the limited power budget. The former give theoretical much more computation capability but in lack of peak performance, while the latter boost its peak performance but incurs heat dissipation problem and therefore limit the number of cores that can be turned on. Thus, it is desirable to devise a robust and efficient approach for managing the operating frequencies and on/off of the multi-core.